Monday, January 3, 2011

These Guys Want to Run Health Care?

CNN reports that garbage pick up in the public sector-and-Wall Street dominated Big Apple has scarcely resumed. Even legacy media like CNN can't help but observe that:

"This weekend, a city with some of the most tight garbage disposal regulations in the country, looked like a dumpster, with piles of garbage on streets and sidewalks."

Whatever the cause, a publicly run New York Santiation Department (NYSD) once again demonstrates that the public sector cannot do the job. Pinni Bohm points out that The Daily News's Juan Gonzalez blames Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith, who is a privatization advocate. But the NYSD is not privatized, so the Daily News once more illustrates the old proverb: take reason and sanity away from a blogger and you get the legacy media. In order to blame privatization for the problems, first the NYSD would have had to have been privatized. Gonzalez lacks the reason and sanity necessary to put the blame where it belongs: on the incompetently run public sector which has sucked New York dry for 15 decades (yes, Juan, government bloat and incompetence in New York go back that far).

New York must make up its mind. Either (1) continue to pay 40% wage premiums to under-worked, unproductive and incompetent public sector unions or (2) become competitive. Privatization is a workable method of accomplishing (2). But blaming privatization for the incompetence of a non-privatized public sector-run SD is, to put it plainly, BS.

Worse, there have been allegations that the NYSD's middle managers deliberately told workers to shirk their duties. These allegations have been made in The New York Post. But The News and Gonzalez choose to chant the excessively staffed NYSD's party line that all workers must be micro-managed or they cannot do their jobs. Maybe it is Juan Gonzalez who needs additional management.

1 comment:

I linked to the article to illustrate a few mistakes Bloomberg and Goldsmith made in planning for the blizzard, not for its argument that privatization (whether it happened or not) was one of them. If, for example, Bloomberg chose not to declare a snow emergency the night before the blizzard blew in, then he shares some blame for the cleanup disaster that followed.

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Mitchell Langbert

About Me

I have researched and written about employee benefit issues and in my previous life was a corporate benefits administrator. I am currently associate professor of business at Brooklyn College. I hold a Ph.D. from the Columbia University Graduate School of Business, an MBA from UCLA and an AB from Sarah Lawrence College. I am working on a project involving public policy. I blog on academic and political topics.